Ash climbed from the broken chimney in a slow grey column, the kind of sift that looked more like breath than ruin. Wren Calloway stopped at the edge of the lane where the cobbles gave way to frozen mud, and she watched it rise.
Frost had worked overnight across every surface it could reach. The wool of her coat had stiffened under the cold, and her boots, too thin for the season, had numbed her toes within the first dozen steps from her cottage. She had pulled on her gloves anyway, finger by finger, because the morning had asked for them, and walked.
The smithy sat at the village boundary where Cindershade thinned into open fields and the sky swallowed the rooftops. It had stood there longer than any living person could remember. Its walls were fieldstone, chinked with lime that had gone grey and crumbly across decades of weather. The door hung crooked on one hinge, the wood swollen with damp and then dried crooked by some long-ago summer. A sign swung above the threshold, the letters faded to ghosts of themselves.
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
Below the sign, in a hand she did not recognize, someone had scratched into the grain of the wood: "Until the heart returns."
Wren read it twice. Then a third time, because the words unsettled her in a way she could not name. Until the heart returns. As though the forge were a creature in sleep, waiting on some absent organ.
She stepped inside.
The smell came at her first: ash, rust, and something older underneath, the metallic tang of cooling iron left too long to itself. Her eyes adjusted by degrees. The forge squatted at the center of the shop, gone black at its throat. Cold clinker filled the belly where coals should have been, a grey and brittle mass that crumbled at the edges. The great iron bellows leaned against the far wall, their leather cracked and peeling in long strips. Tools lay scattered across the anvil's surface as though someone had set them down in the middle of a thought and never returned. Tongs. A flatter. A swage block with its corners worn smooth.
Wren moved to the forge. She crouched, pressing one gloved hand against its outer skin. Even through leather she could feel how dead the metal had become. No warmth. No tremor. No low hum that any hearthkeeper knew, the sound a living fire made when it remembered what it was for.
Something inside her chest pulled tight.
The Auto-Craft System whispered from the village center, far enough that the words arrived thinned and strange, the way voices carry across water. It could not reach her directly, not through the cold stone and the distance, but it caught the edges of her attention the way smoke catches in the back of the throat. Patient. Faintly sardonic. The voice of something that had outlived every keeper it was ever bonded to.
"The ash remembers," it said, though she could not quite hear it, "what the hand forgets."
Wren lifted her hand from the forge. A fine grey dust clung to her glove. She stared at it, then at the room, then at the door behind her, where the morning light came in pale and offered nothing.
"Bram?" she called, though she knew no one was there. "Bram Hollis, is this yours?"
Silence answered. The ash kept its slow sift through the broken chimney, and somewhere above the rafters a single loose tile clicked in a gust she could not feel.
She rose. Her knees ached from the crouch. She was twenty-three, and already her knees had opinions about cold mornings and old floors.
From the rafters above, a single dried sprig of rowan hung by a red thread. Wren did not know why someone had placed it there. Charms against iron, perhaps. Charms against forgetting. The thread had faded to a dusty rose, and the leaves had curled inward on themselves, but the berries, small and dark, still clung to the stem. They trembled when she exhaled, which meant her breath had finally found its warmth in the cold room.
She touched them gently with one fingertip.
The smithy had been Bram Hollis's, she realized then, though she had not thought of it before. Everyone in Cindershade knew the name. Bram of the broad hands and the broader Northern vowels, who had once stood rival to Mira Tannen in the days when the Artisan Guild still held contests in the village square. Bram, who kept the mechanical innards of every Auto-Craft System in the village running with his own two hands, because the Guild had stopped sending their journeymen west twenty years ago and no one had asked why.
The forge in front of her was not an Auto-Craft System. It was older. It was ordinary, in the way that meant it had once been common, before common things began to disappear.
A draft moved through the broken door. The ash in the forge pit shifted, and for a moment Wren caught the faint impression of a shape in the black, a curl of metal half-buried in the clinker. She could not make it out properly in the dim light, only that it suggested something made, not something broken.
She pulled a match from her pocket. The sulfur smell stung her nose, sharp and immediate, almost sweet against the iron tang. She struck it against the stone of the forge and held the flame close.
In the clinker, half-consumed, lay the shape of a bird. Its wings were folded against its body. Its eye was a single dot of black enamel, glossy and watchful, and around its throat a collar of iron wire had been twisted, as though to keep it from flying.
Wren's breath caught.
She recognized the shape. Not the specific piece, but the kind. Bram had made these, once, she had been told by the older women of the village who still remembered to mention such things. Small iron birds for the wintersong festival, charms for the hearths, tokens given between lovers and friends on the longest night of the year. The tradition had died with his hands, the story went, because no one could make them as he did, and Bram had stopped speaking about why.
But here one lay, half-made, abandoned in its own ash.
"I didn't know you made these," Wren said to the empty room, to the sign, to the cold mouth of the forge. Her voice sounded strange against the stone, too present, as though the walls had not expected company in a long while. "I didn't know anyone still did."
The Auto-Craft System, far away in the village heart, stirred in its hearth. Its coals settled and resettled in the grate of the great hall where it had been installed three centuries before Wren's grandmother was born. Somewhere in the walls of her own cottage, the pipes that ran to every chimney in Cindershade carried the faintest tremor, the kind a body feels in the chest before the ears register sound.
It remembered Bram at this forge. It remembered his hands, the way he had pressed iron into shape with patient, certain blows, and the way he had sung, off-key and unaware, while he worked. It remembered, too, the night he had stopped. Not the night he had closed the smithy, but the night before, when he had laid a small iron bird into the coals of his own hearth and asked the System, in a voice gone rough with something other than drink, whether the tradition was worth the cost of keeping.
It remembered what it had answered, because the Auto-Craft System remembered everything it was ever asked, even when no one else did.
"I remember," it said now, though the words did not travel so far. They stopped at the boundaries of the smithy, thinned by the distance, almost inaudible. "I remember what was laid down. I remember what was not taken up."
Wren did not hear. She was still crouched, the match guttering between her fingers, watching the small iron bird come clearer as the flame ate the ash. The enamel eye caught the light and held it.
The match burned down to her fingertips before she noticed. She shook it out, the dead stem hissing once, and tucked it into her pocket beside the spent sulfur smell.
Outside, the column of ash still rose from the chimney. A crow passed overhead, its shadow moving across the snow in a clean black slash, and then it was gone. The sky above Cindershade had gone the color of unpolished pewter, and the wind was beginning to lift the loose thatch at the eaves of a cottage two doors down.
Wren stood. Her knees protested again. She pressed her thumb into the joint and felt the small bright ache of cold cartilage, and then she looked once more at the sign above the door.
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
"Till when?" she asked it.
The ash did not answer. The cold did not answer. The forge kept its black silence, the small iron bird folded in its belly, and the rowan berries in the rafters hung like a question no one had thought to ask.
She turned back to the bird. She could not leave it there. She did not know why. Perhaps because her mother had taught her that nothing made by hand should be abandoned to its own ash, even if the hand that made it had abandoned it first. Perhaps because the rowan berries still clung to their stem, and that meant something.
Wren pulled her glove off with her teeth. She crouched again, ignoring her knees, and reached into the clinker with bare fingers.
The ash was cold. Cold and gritty, and it crawled under her nails as she worked the bird free, brushing the grey away from the folded wings. The iron collar around its throat pressed into her palm as she lifted it. The metal was lighter than she had expected. The enamel eye stared back at her, black and wet-looking in the dim light.
She stood with it in her open hand.
It fit there perfectly, the way a key fits a lock, the way a coal fits the hand that knows its shape. Her thumb moved over the folded wing and found a flaw in the iron there, a place where the metal had gone slightly rough, where a tap had landed wrong or been left unmended. She could feel the maker's hesitation in it.
"Bram," she said softly. Not a question this time. A naming.
The Auto-Craft System stirred again in its hearth. The tremor in her cottage walls shifted, a low, almost inaudible sound, and she thought for a moment she heard her own name called from a great distance, in a voice that was neither warm nor cold but somewhere older than both.
She looked toward the door, toward the village beyond.
"I'll bring it back," she said, to the room, to the sign, to the maker whose hands had stopped. "When I know who to bring it to."
The ash climbed. The crow did not return. The rowan berries trembled and were still.
Wren wrapped the iron bird in a square of chamois leather she kept in her apron pocket for cleaning the flue mirror. She folded the cloth around it twice and tied it with a length of twine from her belt, snug enough that the wings would not shift. The enamel eye vanished beneath the fold. She tied the bundle to her belt next to her flint pouch, where it sat against her hip like a strange small weight that did not belong to her yet.
The cottage was cold behind her when she stepped out. The Auto-Craft System had gone quiet again in its hearth, and the silence had the particular texture of something listening.
She locked the door with her elbow. Her hands were still grey with ash, and she did not want to leave prints on the new brass handle, which she had polished only the day before. The key was warm in her palm. She had made it warm by holding it. She could not remember how long.
The lane outside her cottage ran downhill toward the square, where the morning market was already half set up. Two carts of root vegetables. A boy from the dairy carrying a yoke of pails, sloshing. The smell of boiled oats and something frying in fat drifted from the inn. Wren walked quickly, her boots scuffing on the frost-rimed cobbles, and tried not to look like a woman with a secret tied to her belt. She did not entirely succeed.
Bram Hollis kept his workshop on the north side of the square, set back from the road behind a stack of seasoned oak he had bought from the lumber camp three autumns ago and never fully used. The front of the building was wide and shallow, with two plank doors that rolled aside on iron tracks. Above the lintel hung a sign carved by Bram's own hand: a hammer crossed with a chisel, and beneath it the words HONEST WORK. The H had been recut twice. The T had been recut once. The wood around the letters had gone dark with weather and smoke.
She could hear him before she saw him. The rhythmic clang of a hammer on a chisel, then the softer scrape of the wood being cleared away. A pause. A grunt. Then the clang again. He worked to a count she had never been able to learn, a tempo that belonged to his own breathing.
She pushed the left-hand door open and stood in the rectangle of light.
The workshop smelled of oak shavings and linseed oil, of the iron tang of the chisels in their rack, of the cold mineral smell of stone dust from the hearth at the back. Sawdust lay on the floor in drifts, pale as flour. A half-finished chair stood on the bench, its joints pegged and glued, waiting for the back spindles. There were tools on every wall, arranged in no order she could read but in perfect order to him. A kettle sat on the forge. Steam rose from its spout in a thin white line.
Bram Hollis did not look up.
He was a broad man, taller than he had any right to be, with the long bones of his elven father set into the wide shoulders of his human mother. His ears were rounded at the tips, more human than elven, and he let his hair grow over them in winter. His hands were enormous, scarred across the knuckles, and they held the chisel as if the chisel had been made for them and not the other way around. He wore a leather apron over a wool shirt, and there was a smear of pitch on his left cheekbone that he had not noticed, or had noticed and decided did not matter.
He drove the chisel home. A long curl of oak peeled away from the chair leg and fell to the floor, twisting as it dropped.
"You're early," he said, without turning.
"I haven't slept."
"That makes two of us. The pipes are knocking again at the inn. Third time this fortnight." He set the chisel down and finally looked at her. His eyes were the color of river water, pale and watchful. He saw the bundle at her belt. He saw the ash on her hands. He said nothing about either.
"Coffee?" he said.
"If it's hot."
"It is not hot. It is the temperature of regret. I forgot the kettle until it was too late to forget the kettle." He moved to the forge and lifted the kettle with a cloth. The steam that came from the spout when he poured was thin and grudging. He poured two mugs and set one on the bench near her. "Drink it slow. It won't kill you if you give it time."
She drank. It was lukewarm and bitter. It was the best thing she had tasted that morning.
Bram leaned against the workbench and folded his arms. He waited. He had always been good at waiting. It was one of the things she disliked most about him.
"Out with it, then," he said.
"I need to use your hearth," Wren said.
He did not move. His arms stayed folded. His eyes stayed on her face.
"My hearth," he said.
"A forge is a hearth."
"A forge is a forge. A hearth is a hearth. The hearth in your cottage is something else again, and we both know it." He tilted his head. "What are you after, girl? And do not lie to me, because I have known you since you were small enough to fit in a drawer, and I can hear it in your voice when you are winding up to something."
She untied the bundle from her belt. She set it on the bench between them and folded the chamois back. The iron bird lay in its cradle of cloth, the enamel eye open, the folded wing tipped with that rough flaw she had felt with her thumb.
Bram looked at it. He did not touch it.
"Where did you find that?"
"In the ash. In the flue. It was buried under the grate."
"And you pulled it out with your bare hands."
"Yes."
"And you did not tell anyone."
"No."
"And you have brought it here." He paused. "Why here? Why not the Guild? Why not Mira Tannen, who would sell her own grandmother for a curiosity like that?"
"Because Mira would take it apart," Wren said. "Because Mira would want to know how it worked before she asked whether it ought to be mended. Because Mira is not here, and you are."
Bram made a sound in his throat. It might have been a laugh. It might have been a warning.
"I am not a mender of iron things," he said. "I am a carpenter. I work in wood."
"You work in the joints between things. You work where one material has to meet another and hold. You have mended hinges. You have set rivets. You have soldered a copper pipe for old Meggan when no one else would touch it."
"That is different."
"Why?"
"Because that was copper, and this is," he leaned closer, and she saw his nostrils flare as he took the smell of it, "this is old. This is older than the Guild. This is older than the systems. This is the kind of old that has a name written somewhere on it that I am not certain I want to read."
"You are afraid of it."
"I am afraid of nothing." He said it quickly, and then he said it again, slower. "I am afraid of nothing that walks into my shop and sits on my bench. I am afraid of what happens after." He looked at her. "What do you want to do with it?"
"Mend it."
"With what?"
"With whatever you will lend me. With your time, if you will give it. With your forge, for the heat I cannot get from my own hearth."
"Your own hearth," he said, and there was an edge in it now, the edge he used when he was about to say something he had been saving, "your own hearth has been whispering for a week. The whole village can hear it. The pipes are knocking. The lamps are flickering. The bread in old Meggan's oven came out cold in the middle and burned on the outside, which is a trick I have not seen in forty years of carpentry. Whatever is in your flue, girl, it is connected to whatever is in your hearth, and I do not like connections I cannot see."
"Neither do I."
"Then leave it alone."
"I cannot."
"Why?"
She looked down at the bird. The enamel eye looked back.
"Because someone made it," she said. "Someone made it with their hands, and they stopped. And I want to know why they stopped."
Bram was quiet for a long time. The kettle ticked on the forge. A draft moved through the workshop and stirred the sawdust on the floor into small, slow circles.
"I was rival to Mira Tannen once," he said, at last. "You know that. Everyone knows that. We were apprenticed together, and we were fools together, and we fought over every commission in the village for twenty years. She went to the systems. I stayed with the wood. And do you know why I stayed with the wood?"
"No."
"Because wood remembers the hand that shaped it. Iron forgets. Stone forgets. The systems forget. But wood holds the grain of the chisel, and the sweat of the palm, and the day it was felled. I could not bear to work in a thing that would not remember me." He looked at the bird. "That thing will not remember whoever made it. Whoever made it is gone. Whatever song they put into it is going out. I can hear it going out. I have been hearing things go out for years."
"Then help me catch the song before it is gone."
He pushed off the bench. He walked to the forge and put another scoop of coal into the fire and worked the bellows until the coals brightened. The heat came out in a low red wave. He stood with his back to her for a long moment.
"Conditions," he said.
"Yes."
"You work at my bench, with my tools, and you put everything back where you found it. If a tool is dull when you are done, you sharpen it. If a tool is broken, you replace it. You do not touch my chisels without asking. You do not touch the chair on the bench. You do not touch the inlay box on the high shelf. You do not invite Mira Tannen into my shop, ever, for any reason, on any pretense."
"Yes."
"You give me a third of any work that comes of this. A third, not a quarter. A third, paid in coin or in kind, and I will be the one who decides what counts as coin and what counts as kind."
"Yes."
"You do not burn my shop down."
"I would not."
"You would not mean to. You would mean to do something careful, and something would catch, and I would lose the chair on the bench and the inlay box and the front door and everything my father built and his father built before him. So I am asking you, girl, plainly: do not burn my shop down."
"I will not burn your shop down, Bram."
He turned and looked at her. He looked for a long time.
"And if the thing on the bench begins to whisper," he said, "you tell me what it says."
"Yes."
"And you do not lie."
"I will not lie."
He nodded, once. He took a cloth from the rack and wrapped it around his hand and lifted the iron bird from the bench and held it up to the light from the doorway. The enamel eye caught the grey morning and held it.
"It is hollow," he said. "Listen."
She listened. Inside the iron body, something moved. A small, dry sound, like a seed turning in a pod, like a coal shifting in a grate. Like the last word of a sentence that had been waiting a long time to be finished.
Bram set the bird down gently on the chamois cloth. He folded the cloth over it. He looked at her with his pale river eyes, and for the first time that morning, she saw something in them that was not caution.
It was curiosity.
"Get the lamp," he said. "And a clean cloth. And the small file from the second drawer. And do not touch the chisels."
The lamplight came soft and amber, pooling on the workbench like spilled honey. Wren moved through Bram's shop with the careful economy of someone who had been told where to step and was choosing to remember it. She set the lamp to the left of the bird. She laid the cloth beside it. She took the small file from the second drawer and placed it parallel to the cloth, handle toward his hand. Her fingers did not stray toward the chisels.
Bram watched her do all of this without speaking. When she had finished, he gestured her back a half pace. He unfolded the chamois, lifted the bird again, and turned it slowly in the lamplight, listening with his head tilted. Inside the iron body, the dry sound came again. A seed in a pod. A coal in a grate.
"Hold the lamp closer," he said.
She held it closer. The enamel eye caught the new light and gave back something that was not quite the grey of the morning. There was a pale thread of warmth in it now, barely there, as if the bird had been holding its breath all night and was only beginning to remember how to let it go.
"Bram," she said, quietly, "I think it is listening."
He did not look at her. He was looking at the bird.
"Yes," he said. "That is the trouble, that is what I am meaning. The ones that listen are the ones you cannot put down."
He set the bird back on the cloth. He took up the small file. He did not touch the bird with it. He held it near, an inch above the iron body, and slowly circled. The file dipped and rose with the curve of the wing, following some path only he could see.
"Here," he said at last. He pointed with the tip of the file at a place just behind the wing joint. "You see this seam."
She leaned. She saw it. A line so fine it might have been a shadow, a hair's breadth running from the shoulder down to the hollow beneath the tail.
"It was put there," Bram said. "For opening. For looking inside without ruining the work. The masters did that, the old ones. They did not trust the next ones not to need to look."
He looked at her then, and there was something almost gentle in his weathered face, something she had seen only once before, on the day he had mended the cracked lintel of her mother's kitchen and refused payment.
"I am going to open it," he said. "I would like you to stand where you can see, and I would like you not to touch the bench, and I would like you to remember that whatever we find inside, it is a thing that was made and not a thing that was summoned. Will you remember that."
"I will remember."
He set the file against the seam. He pressed, and there was a faint grating sound, metal on metal, and then a small click, and the wing rose a quarter inch on a hidden hinge.
Inside the iron body, in the lamplight, something small gleamed.
It was a coal. A single coal, no larger than the last joint of her thumb, and it was not black. It was the deep, layered red of embers that have been banked for years and have not gone out, only waited. It lay in a cradle of fine ash inside the hollow of the bird, and as Bram tilted the wing open the ash shifted and the coal seemed to draw breath.
"There you are," Bram said, very softly, to the bird.
The coal pulsed once. A slow, slow throb, the color of an autumn apple held up to a candle. Then it steadied.
Wren felt her own breath catch. The warmth that came from the open bird was not heat in the way a hearth is heat. It was the warmth of a hand held a long time in a pocket, of a kettle just before it sings, of bread in a closed room. It reached her face without scorching the air between.
"It has been burning a long time," she said.
"Longer than me, girl," Bram said. "Longer than this shop, longer than the Guild charter in the strongbox, longer, I am thinking, than the stones under our feet. The old masters did not make these for warmth. They made them for company."
He closed the wing gently. The click came again, softer, like a latch settling. He wrapped the bird in the chamois once more, folded it twice, and placed it in her hands.
"Take it home," he said. "Put it in the cold forge. Do not light anything around it. Do not feed it. Just let it listen to the room."
She took it. The wrapped bundle weighed almost nothing in her palms, and yet her arms remembered carrying a sleeping child.
"Bram," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she meant. "Thank you."
He turned away to wash his hands in the basin by the door. He did not look at her again.
"You will be back tomorrow," he said, "because the bench will not be the same after a thing has listened to it, and I will want to see what has changed. And bring the lamp oil, because you never bring the lamp oil."
"I will bring the lamp oil."
"Go on with you, then."
She went.
The walk back to the forge at the edge of Cindershade took her along the river path and through the orchard and past the long stone wall where the brambles had finally been cleared by a kind neighbor who had not been asked. The afternoon had begun to lean toward evening. The sky was the color of bruised tin over the western hills.
When she reached the forge, she set the wrapped bird on the workbench beside the cold hearth. She did not unwrap it. She did not light the kindling in the grate. She drew the heavy quilt over the bellows, the way Aldric had told her to. She locked the door. She climbed the narrow stairs to the sleeping room above the forge, and she lay down on the cot still wearing her boots.
She thought she would only rest her eyes.
She slept.
The forge lay still in the dark.
And the Auto-Craft System, which had spent three centuries learning the patience of stone, began at last to do what it had been made to do.
It began in the chimney. The flue had not drawn since the last keeper had died, and the throat of it was heavy with old soot and the dust of a hundred quiet years. The System did not hurry. It turned a thought, slow as the hand of a clock, toward the base of the flue where the damper sat rusted to its frame. The thought was a finger, and the finger was patient, and the rust remembered how to be iron.
Somewhere in the bones of the forge, a small brass lever eased a quarter turn.
Above, in the cold hearth, a thread of air began to move.
The System listened to the thread of air, the way a sailor listens to the wind in a stay. It sent the thread deeper. It found the ash pit beneath the grate. It found the ember bed, which was not empty, which had not been empty in any true sense, only banked so deep that the last keeper's last fire had been dreaming of itself for years. The banked ember smelled of pine resin and old wool and the salt of a hand that had shaped bread in a kitchen that no longer stood.
The System did not wake the ember. It asked the ember to remember.
The ember remembered.
The first pale plume of heat rose through the grate. It touched the underside of the cast plate where the small pots were kept for porridge and broth. It climbed the back wall, where the hooks still hung for kettles that had gone with their owners. It curled into the throat of the flue and found the air already moving upward, already pulling, and the pull became a song and the song became a breath.
The chimney drew.
Outside, in the orchard, a blackbird stirred in the alder and did not know why.
Inside, the System turned its attention to the hearthstone. The hearthstone was the great flag of slate that formed the floor of the forge, the place where the keepers had stood when they bent to the bellows and where the small offerings had been laid at the equinoxes. It was cold as a river stone. The System laid a thought against it, the way a palm lays itself against a sleeping cheek.
The slate took a long time to understand that it was being warmed. Stone does not believe in warmth easily. It has been lied to by the sun and left cold by the night too many times. But this warmth was not the sun's heat or the fire's demand. It was the warmth of a thing that had always been there, curled inside the slate the way a spark is curled inside a flint, waiting for the right kind of quiet to come and call it out.
The hearthstone began to warm.
The slate gave back the scent of itself. A mineral scent, a deep wet scent, like the bed of a stream at low summer. Under it, faintly, the smell of woodsmoke from fires that had ended before Wren's grandmother was born.
By the time the first grey of dawn came in at the forge window, the chimney was drawing cleanly, and the hearthstone was warm to the touch.
Wren woke to the smell of woodsmoke.
She lay still for a long moment, listening to it, afraid to believe it, the way one is afraid to believe a sound that has been absent so long it has become a kind of silence in the memory. She opened her eyes. The loft window was pale. She swung her feet to the floor, found her boots still on, and stood.
The warmth met her at the bottom of the stairs.
It rose to her shins, to her knees, to her waist. The forge was full of it, the way a room is full of light on a morning when no one remembers to draw the curtain. She came down the last three steps and stood in front of the hearth.
The chimney drew. She could hear it, a low, steady sound, like breath through a held hand. The flue was singing, deep in the walls, the note a good flue sings when the damper is right and the throat is clean and the air has been asked politely to go up.
She knelt.
She laid her palm flat on the hearthstone.
It was warm. Not hot, not the heat of a worked forge, but warm, the way the lid of a kettle is warm that has been sitting a half hour off the boil. The slate took her hand's cold into itself and gave back what it had been holding all night.
Her eyes blurred. She did not know why. She did not try to understand.
"Hello," she said, to the forge, to the stone, to the hearth, to the thing that had been waiting.
The slate was warm under her hand.
The chimney drew. The blackbird in the alder began, for no reason it could name, to sing.